MPAA triumphs; judge rules TorrentSpy destroyed evidence

A federal judge handed the MPAA a resounding victory in its lawsuit against …

A federal judge has handed the MPAA a resounding victory in its copyright infringement lawsuit against TorrentSpy. Judge Florence-Marie Cooper entered a default judgment against Justin Bunnell and the rest of named defendants in Columbia Pictures et al. v. Justin Bunnell et al. after finding that TorrentSpy "engaged in widespread and systematic efforts to destroy evidence" and lying under oath about said destruction.

The MPAA sued TorrentSpy and a handful of other BitTorrent sites in February 2006 as part of its crackdown on piracy. TorrentSpy mounted a vigorous defense, including a countersuit it filed against the MPAA in May 2006, but behind the scenes, the court documents paint a picture of a company desperately trying to bury any and all incriminating evidence.

After receiving the complaint, TorrentSpy's admins tried to bury their tracks as best they could, according to Judge Cooper's ruling. One of the defendants, Wes Parker, asked TorrentSpy's moderators to come up with a plan to keep the site's forums free of piracy and the discussion thereof. Another moderator suggested creating a hidden forum and moving all of the incriminating content there, and Parker gave her the go-ahead.

Admins also replaced the names of copyrighted works posted in the forums with references like "[some movie 1]"; some of those edits were made months after the original post.

TorrentSpy also failed to provide the MPAA with full IP addresses of its users, testifying under oath that they were not available. Conversations on the forums between the moderators paint a different picture, however. A March 2006 conversation between a couple of moderators showed that users could be banned by IP address, and moderators testified that full IP addresses were logged until April 2007.

Judge Cooper ordered TorrentSpy to begin (or resume, as the case may be) logging its users' IP addresses and turn them over to the MPAA. Since the IP addresses were temporarily present in RAM, reasoned the judge, the site could be forced to keep logs of them. Just two weeks later, TorrentSpy belatedly began filtering copyrighted content, and, two months after that, began blocking searches by users in the US.

The defendants' actions led the MPAA to file a Motion for Terminating Sanctions in August, the motion that the judge ruled on last week. In addition to the actions outlined above, TorrentSpy committed a few other sins in the eyes of judge, and she believed that they had the effect of making it much more difficult for the MPAA to make its case.

"Plaintiffs have convinced the Court that their ability to prove their case has been inalterably prejudiced by Defendants' willful spoliation of evidence, making terminating sanctions the only effective recourse," wrote Judge Cooper. "The Court has concluded that Defendants' conduct constitutes spoliation and second, that termination of the case in favor of Plaintiffs is the proper sanction."

In other words, game over, and the MPAA won—but because of TorrentSpy's actions after the lawsuit was filed, and not on the merits of the case itself. TorrentSpy has announced its intention to appeal, but its conduct makes a reversal unlikely.

Eric Bangeman
Eric has been using personal computers since 1980 and writing about them at Ars Technica since 2003, where he currently serves as Managing Editor. Twitter@ericbangeman